Brendan Fraser is currently experiencing a career renaissance thanks to Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, which is allowing both fans (and the actor himself) to go back and consider those films he made back when he was a star the first time around. There’s been a lot of talk about Fraser’s time with The Mummy franchise, but the actor took a recent opportunity in the San Francisco bay area to apologize for something that went wrong while filming George of the Jungle, and in doing so made a brand new error.
Fraser recently attended the Mill Valley Film Festival (via SFGate) where The Whale was set to be screened. Fraser was given an award, one of many he has already received, and another on the road to what might be an Oscar nomination. He told a story about the production of George of the Jungle, which took place in San Francisco and around the greater bay area. He felt a need to apologize for the movie bringing traffic to a halt on the Golden Gate Bridge during one scene. The only problem was, he got the bridge wrong. What Fraser said, was this…
When we were doing 'George of the Jungle,' George goes to rescue a parachutist tangled in the Golden Gate Bridge. That means Disney put a mannequin hanging by a parachute from the uprights. It brought traffic to a standstill on either side of the bridge.
The problem, however, was that George of the Jungle didn’t shoot the parachute scene at the Golden Gate Bridge, but rather the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. It's the other major bridge that crosses into the city of San Francisco, but from the east rather than the north. The bridge is the wrong color, as can be seen in the image above, and the background placed behind Fraser in this green screened image is not a view you’d get from the Golden Gate Bridge.
To be fair to Brendan Fraser, George of the Jungle came out in 1997, so it’s been a while. It’s not that hard to forget which bridge you were working on and simply remember it as the more famous of the two. A lot of movies have filmed on the Golden Gate over the years, While Fraser may have forgotten which bridge this all took place on, it’s not that shocking that he remembers the event itself as it apparently caused a minor uproar in the city that day. Fraser continues…
My trailer was on the other side in a parking lot. I just remember watching the Golden Gate Bridge. There's this dummy parachutist hanging from it. I had the TV on, and 'Oprah' got interrupted because there was a special news report with helicopters saying a parachute is dangling on the bridge.
Everything involved in filming the mannequin hanging from the bridge probably caused a disruption in itself, which resulted in some traffic problems, but then when people who didn’t realize it wasn’t a real person got a hold of the news, it’s easy to see how things would have gotten out of hand.
If Brendan Fraser's career continues to ascend, perhaps he can come back to the Mill Valley Film Festival in a few years with a new Oscar contender and apologize for forgetting the name of the bridge.
